The Mapmaker's Children (3 page)

Now the dog trembled and hid his face deep in a wooden cranny where the house had separated from the baseboard, leaving a gap, an almost-but-not-quite match.

She couldn't immediately fix the floor, but she could remedy the dog's anxiety. “Hey, little fellow,” she coaxed. “Come on out of there. Does he need water or to go to the bathroom?” she asked Jack.

“He went before we came in.” Jack scratched at the five o'clock shadow. He looked worn out.

What day was it? On Mondays, he flew to Austin then back to Aqua Systems' headquarters in D.C. for a Friday roundtable with the company CEOs. It wasn't Friday already? She could swear she'd heard the Presbyterian church's bells ringing the day before. Though they'd been in the house for three months, she still wasn't used to their chime and woke with a start at every Sunday call to worship. The ringing had been endearing when she'd imagined sitting by the nursery window feeding her child to their tune. Now she found them mocking. She'd pull her pillow over her head and whisper,
Shut up, shut up, shut up
with each bell toll.

“Why are you home?” It came out as more of an accusation than she'd intended.

He pushed a heavy box aside and bent down. “She's all growl and no bite, ole boy.”

Eden straightened her shoulders defensively but let it go. She'd expended her supply of fighting strength.

“What've you got there?” Jack picked up the dog, and as he did, a cricket the size of a paper clip bounded from its clutch. “I'll be damned, he caught the cricket.”

“Kill it quick,” said Eden.

The cricket leapt down the hole again.

“Great,” Eden huffed. “Lost it.”

“My flight to Austin was canceled. Storms,” Jack explained. “They've put me on an eight
A.M
. departure tomorrow. I thought I'd come home with a surprise.” He nodded back to the entryway and the thorny rose sticking up sideways from under his briefcase. “The puppy was a bonus.” He met her stare, her eyes daggered. “My mistake.” The dog pulled toward the wall, sniffing madly. “I'm sure someone in town would love him. A good family.”

“Lord knows we're not,” she said, then wished she could squash each word.
Shut up, Eden, just shut up
, she told herself.

Jack put the dog down, and it plunged back into the fissure. He paid no mind, leaving them in the pantry: Eden, dog, and cricket. The refrigerator
door opened. A beer top popped. The metal bottle cap clinked on the marble counter.

“What about him?” Eden called.

“I'll figure it out,” Jack said, his voice trailing off toward the living room. That was his way of saying he didn't want to talk anymore. He wanted to sit on the couch and zone out to ESPN soccer.

The dog's ears pooled on the floor, his snout inches below. There could be a spider or snake down that hole, thought Eden. Jack was just going to drink his beer while the dog got bitten? It was plain negligent.

“For heaven's sake.” Eden pulled the dog from the crevice. This time, the cranny came, too.

With a hoary groan, the pantry floor opened. The cleft was not the house deteriorating beneath them. It was purposeful: a handle. The earthy dampness of long-harbored air plumed in a strange coolness. Instead of bounding into the shallow pit, the dog sat obediently beside Eden, his furry muzzle warm against her knee.

“Jack?” Eden's voice was barely louder than the cricket's chirp. The room choked on dusty phantoms.

In the darkness below glowed an orb. A moon-shaped child's face, decapitated.

It's a sign, she thought. I'm going to die in this place, this town, this marriage if I don't get out
now
.

She screamed and dropped the door in the floor.

FROM THE
NEW CHARLESTOWN SPECTATOR: A JOURNAL OF CIVILIZATION
INSURRECTION AT HARPERS FERRY

October 18, 1859—Rumors reached this place at 6 o'clock this morning of a Negro insurrection at Harpers Ferry some two days prior. Wagonloads of rifles were seized, along with plans to distribute weapons to slaves in the surrounding country for a national mutiny!

A band of white and Negro men took possession of the United States Armory on Sunday evening. They cut and destroyed the telegraph wires, so while we, innocent residents and neighbors, heard the gunshots and hostile shouts outside our doors, we had no concrete details or means to report—till now.

Upon hearing word of the assault, Governor Wise sent Virginia militia to Harpers Ferry and a dispatch to the capital with an emergency plea for President Buchanan to provide federal assistance, which the President immediately granted Monday. Several U.S. Marine companies advanced south on orders to take the Harpers Ferry Bridge by midnight at all hazards. The mission was well accomplished, as we are here, on Tuesday, reporting the facts from cease-fire.

Captain John Brown has been arrested as the leader of the rabble uprising and is interned at the Jefferson County jailhouse. While Captain Brown is mortally wounded, Governor Wise has sworn that the hand of justice will be put forthwith to him and his accomplices so that our countrymen will see that the State of Virginia acted in accordance with the law; and furthermore, that we are a peace-loving nation, white men and slaves living in prosperous harmony. Rebellion of any sort will fail as irrefutably as that at Harpers Ferry.

N
ORTH
E
LBA
, N
EW
Y
ORK
O
CTOBER
21, 1859

“Q
uickly,” Mary instructed the girls. “Get the last of the smoked sausage and cheese.”

Little Ellen ran outside to the root cellar while Sarah crammed clean bandages and a fresh shirt into a burlap sack.

Owen had burst through the front door, stinking of swamps and sweat and blood caked so thick to his face that Mary Brown had thought him some grisly assailant and nearly ran him through with the fireplace poker. But then he'd begged, “Help me, family,” and had fallen to his knees, and they knew him to be the only missing member of the Harpers Ferry raiders.

Mary, Sarah, and little Ellen had stayed behind to run the Brown farm while the rest of the family had gone down to Harpers Ferry to aid in John's great insurrection. They had hoped to spark the beginning of the end of slavery, but now all were dead, in custody, or taking flight as fugitives, like Owen. Even Sarah's sister Annie and sister-in-law Martha were in hiding somewhere between Maryland and New York. Mr. Sanborn, one of John's Secret Committee of Six, had sent word to Mary that the young girls were distraught in spirit but well in body. It had provided some comfort to them over the last week of silent anticipation. The future hovered dark and merciless on the horizon, slowly moving closer like a storm. Deluge imminent.

“Hold still,” Mary told Owen as she threaded the needle straight into his forehead. He sat on the kitchen stool, the bloody rags used to clean his wound underfoot. “It must be stitched up before you go—if it festers, you'll take a fever and die on the journey or be caught.”

He'd run. When their father, John, had denied General Lee's truce of
surrender and the marines had stormed their barricaded firehouse, they'd known without asking: he'd run as swift as he could out the back, without stopping even to look behind as the sword came down on their father.

Owen was Sarah's half brother, born to John's first wife, who'd died in childbirth. He'd never been the bravest or the most loyal, but he was always the first to sense danger and avoid it. And though he was not her blood, Sarah's mother had raised him from nappies and coddled him more than her own at times, for the sake of his lost mother. She did the same now, not inquiring of him all the questions on the tip of Sarah's tongue: How had he come all the way up from Virginia? How had he been spared the bullets that took her brothers Watson and Oliver? Why was he not sitting beside Father in the Jefferson County jailhouse? Instead, Mary used the last of their medicinal catgut to sew fine, embroidery-like stitches so that not even a scar would remain to remind him of this disastrous affair.

They'd received all the newspaper reports. In the dark of night on October 16, John's raiding men had severed the telegraph wires to prevent anyone from alerting the authorities, seized the B&O train en route to the Harpers Ferry station, and successfully taken the U.S. Armory. Once there, however, they'd waited, expectantly, for an army of uprising slaves that would never come to their support. Just as those who argued for passive patience and civil discourse had warned John, blood only precipitated more blood. True to prophesy: the first man to bleed had not been a slaveholding enemy but a free black man, a baggage handler, Hayward Shepherd, who died by one of John's own men, his would-be liberator. Words and action once more in brutal opposition.

There'd been countless messages from prominent business colleagues and Underground Railroad friends, everyone from the author and philosopher Amos Bronson Alcott to the renowned abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Most of the investors in the raid were on their way to safety in Canada or abroad. Though their goals had been righteous, their means of anarchy would not go unpunished.

Home alone in North Elba, Mary, Sarah, and little Ellen had stayed up each night sick with worry that all would perish, that angry slave catchers would come to take vengeance on them, that the law would come to
do the same. Their North Elba neighbors were silent, however. Despite being a community whose roads and homes had been built on abolitionary blueprints, they stayed away, shunning the “unlawful” actions while the newspapers ran headlines:
HARPERS FERRY VIGILANTES
'
BLOOD SPILT
;
THE SOUTH WILL HAVE JUSTICE
;
UNITED STATES MARINES CRUSH SLAVE REBELLION
;
CAPTAIN BROWN MORTALLY WOUNDED BUT IN CUSTODY
!

The world seemed to turn its back on them, the family Brown. Even Owen, still bleeding from a Harpers Ferry wound, was now distancing himself from the event, their mission, the work with the Underground Railroad, and their lifelong beliefs in a world of free equality.

Little Ellen returned breathless, tears streaming. “I can't find the cheese!”

Mary finished sewing Owen's wound, then went out the back kitchen door, to the cellar. Ellen followed, wringing her rag doll to shreds.

Sarah was determined not to let Owen leave without answers. She was just about to demand them when he shoved a wad of paper at her.

She smoothed the dirty page and immediately recognized the faded loops and lines of her pictogram. Her father had asked her to draw a map for the uprising slaves in the surrounding plantations. A visual path to the circle of tall pointed grasses in the woods, code for their hidden arsenal of spears. Plaited railroad tracks through the woods were to lead them secretly to Harpers Ferry township to join John Brown and his men. A beautiful lightning bolt over the U.S. Armory building symbolized the ignition of freedom against southern slave masters. She'd been so proud of the drawing. Her father had praised her for its beauty and covert brilliance.

John had planned to have Underground Railroad associates in Boston print copies of the image with the Bible verse Galatians 5:1:
Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of slavery
. They'd intended to pass the tracts round the Virginia area plantations under the guise of religious proselytizing, but the funding had not come as hoped.

Her father's Boston associates were wary. Helping runaways escape to freedom was one thing; attacking a federal institution was quite another.
Technically, it was an act of treason, and a majority of the law-abiding abolitionists in New England withheld their financial support of this Brown scheme.

A local printer who owed John a favor agreed to print a few dozen replications of Sarah's map. Sarah had seen only her original. The copy Owen handed her was a messy blur of imprecise ink.

“The southern lawmen have copies.” Owen stuck a grimy finger to the page. “They're looking for the man who drew this map and swear he'll hang for treason, too.”

“I—” Sarah began, but Mary and Ellen returned.

Owen quickly crumbled the page into his palm. “I must go.” He took the sack of food and provisions without thanks.

“To Canada?” asked Mary.

“No.” Owen fingered his stitched forehead, then looked away. “I'll send word when it's safe. If you don't hear from me, it's better.” He marched toward the door, stopped, and locked eyes with Sarah. “No more. Whatever they say or do.” He shook his head. “Let them advance without further sacrificial Browns. We've spilled enough blood. It's over, Sarah.”

He took one of Father's old hats off the hook, pulled it tightly down over his forehead, and left.

Mary didn't ask Sarah what he'd meant. She merely shut the door behind him and led Ellen up to change for bed. But Sarah knew. He was telling her to stop drawing the maps for the UGRR. He was telling her to follow his lead and run away. The half of him that was not the same as her was weak. Sarah was stronger than that. She was the daughter of John Brown and her mother, who was alive, struggling through every minute of this nightmare by her side.

Upstairs, Mary stuttered a lullaby to calm Ellen: “Hush, baby doll, I pray you don't cry. I'll give you some bread and some milk by and by…”

Sarah gritted her teeth. “You're wrong, Owen. It's just beginning.”

N
EW
C
HARLESTOWN
, W
EST
V
IRGINIA
A
UGUST
2014

T
he slam of the front door woke Eden with a start. She'd had a horrible night's sleep. Nightmares full of every incarnation of baby doll heads: a baby doll head growing out of her garden lettuce; a baby doll head where the moon ought to be; a dog chasing a bouncing baby doll head; Jack casually holding it like an apple and telling her it was
nothing but a bit of rubbish
—oh wait, that last one
had
happened.

He'd completely dismissed her, the same way he had her questions to Dr. Baldwin. She'd spent hours on the Internet trying to cull any secret tip, cure, or old wives' tale from the pregnancy chat rooms and obstetrics threads. Then in one fell swoop, he'd cast off her queries and made it sound as if she were asinine. It infuriated her.

Of course she didn't believe in ghosts, mojo, or spooky-wooky bunkum, but she did believe in the supernatural, and omens fell into that category. Where exactly the dividing line was drawn, she wasn't sure. What she was sure was that she'd found a porcelain baby's head, cracked through the skull, in a pit that by all rights should've been discovered by their pricey architect, if not before. She'd seen the
Amityville
movies. Given what they'd been through, it seemed the house was mocking her. And Jack had done absolutely nothing, because he no doubt agreed.

They'd put in seven good, earnest years of trying to make their union fruitful and had failed. She'd failed. It was time to cut her losses. She couldn't live like this the rest of her days, being reminded of that every time she looked at Jack or walked into the house's pantry, for God's sake. She'd be like that doll head: locked up in the pit, forgotten, powerless, still on earth but dead.

She shivered at the thought. First step, call the PR agency and see if she could get her old job back. If so, she could rent a one-bedroom apartment or stay at a hotel in the city until she found her own place. But with what money? She rolled over and rubbed her forehead. Their joint account was practically empty. Why, oh why, hadn't she set up a secret savings like her mother had advised? At the time, Eden had taken the suggestion as another rebuff—doubt in Eden's ability to sustain the marriage. Maybe she'd seen something of the disappointments to come. Mother's intuition. Another gift Eden had not earned.

Downstairs, the metallic screen door rattled, shaking the whole house. The clock read 9:01. Jack must've missed his flight again, she told herself, but as the morning light threaded the slats of her bedroom blinds, her mind churned at that unlikelihood. What did she think: that she could go back to sleep? With someone or some
thing
walking around downstairs banging doors?

Sudden hot fear had her kicking off the bedsheets. At the bedroom door, she paused.

Unfamiliar footsteps scampered below. Jack's gait was slower, the amble of a tall man with legs that made a confident, wide arc. Was it the tiny body of the doll scuttling for its stolen head? She broke out in a sweat imagining the form bumping into the baseboards, the dog sniffing at its dusty rags.

She wiped the moisture from her upper lip. Nonsense, she reprimanded herself. She wasn't a scared eight-year-old anymore, wearing earplugs to bed to keep from hearing footsteps in the night. Her father had said it was the tree limbs on the roof gable, so she'd rolled the spongy plugs between her fingers and inserted them into her ears, waiting as they slowly expanded to fill each canal. Whatever bumps occurred, she was unaware, and she liked the peace that ignorance bestowed. Eden hadn't thought of those earplug years in ages. They would've helped with Jack's snoring, but that was neither here nor there.

With exaggerated force, she swung open the door and charged headlong into the sunlight. “Who's there?” she called over the banister.

The footsteps stopped.

Eden started down the staircase, then remembered her appearance. If it was a serious intruder, a lone woman scantily clad might give him illicit ideas. So she hung back, cursing herself for being in the exact position she scoffed at in suspense films.
Why is she running upstairs? What an idiot!
she'd said to Jack, who'd replied,
You've got to have a chase. She can't outwit the enemy in the first scene
.

She caught a glimpse of herself in the framed reflection of their wedding photo on the wall. No longer the young, coiffed businesswoman she'd once been: now her hair was a rat's nest; her eyes, two dark hollows. A macabre sight. Perhaps she did have the upper hand.

“Hello, I hear you.”

Prancing around the corner came the little orange dog, followed by a child—flesh and blood.

Eden gasped.

The girl held a can of cat food with the top peeled back like a potato chip, and Eden registered the rank odor of compressed meat. She turned her head to keep from gagging.

“He's paying me to do it,” said the girl.

The child was obviously lost or mentally unstable.

“This is a mistake.”

“Are you Mrs. Anderson?” She cocked her head like a spring sparrow.

Eden nodded. Her stomach dipped at the cat food smell. Coming off the in vitro hormones seemed to have more side effects than going on: nausea, wild dreams, paranoia, hot flashes. But then, she'd been on the doses for so many years, she couldn't recall how
normal
felt.

“I live next door,” the girl continued. “Mr. Anderson came over this morning and made me a deal.” She pulled the lid off the can and set it on the ground.

The dog padded over, took one lick of the mealy meat, and turned away. It was still here, and Jack was gone. This was
not
taking care of it.

“He's paying me fifty dollars on Friday if I feed and walk your dog while he's off wherevers. See?” She held up a shiny silver key. “I'm not a burglar. He told me to come because of your allergies. Doctor says I'm
allergic to pollen—just the March and April kind. My face swells up like a fat strawberry. It sucks.”

“My allergies?” asked Eden. She rubbed her forehead, trying to clear the cobwebs of this nightmare.

“To Cricket—dander, my doctor calls it.” The girl nodded at the dog, who had gone on to turn the can sideways. Chunks were pressed between the wooden floor slats like brown Play-Doh. She'd have to mop with Pine-Sol to get rid of the stench.

“Uh-huh. That's what Mr. Anderson said?” Eden ran a hand through her hair, and her shirt rode up high on her thighs. First things first: get decent. “I'm sorry, what's your name?”

“Cleo.”

“Cleo. That's pretty. I'm Eden. As you can see, you kind of caught me off guard. I'm still in my pajamas.” She pulled the Sting T-shirt down. “Can you give me a minute?”

She went upstairs and stomped around the boxes of clothes in her bedroom. How dare Jack do this to her—leave for the week, give their house key to a child stranger, and ask her to take care of it all for him. If he were standing there now, she'd tell him what a careless,
ridiculous
idea…fifty bucks for a kid to feed the dog cat food? Was that even safe? The child could poison the thing, and then what—then she'd be left to deal with a dead dog while Jack was off playing cowboy in Texas. The nerve.

The longer it took her to find her clothes, the more spun up she became. Her heart pounded. Her cheeks flamed. Her only calming thought was that he'd learn quickly after she was gone that someone had to clean up his messes; soon she'd look back on this moment after two martinis at an agency lunch and say,
Thank God that's over, thank God I'm here now, thank God
.

She pulled on a hibiscus-printed maxi dress, combed her hair once through, and went downstairs again.

“Now then,” she said, but the girl was gone, as was the dog.

She went out on the front porch. To the right on Apple Hill Lane, a woman in a wide-brimmed hat knelt on a gardening cushion, weeding
her yellow begonias. Directly across the street, a man who looked too young to be retired sat on his front porch drinking from a mug and leisurely reading a newspaper. A couple of moms in workout clothes chatted as they pushed strollers at a pace that made Eden tired to watch. She hurried inside and shut the wooden door. The moms with their strollers passed. Their peppy voices filtered through the wall.

“Stomach flu. The kids are passing it round like candy. Phil and I haven't slept in a week. Vomit everywhere!” one of the moms explained.

The other chuckled. “These are the days we'll laugh over when we're old and the kids are grown and
their
kids are barfing buckets on their Persian rug.”

Eden remembered what her mother had said when she told her they were trying to get pregnant a month after the wedding. “I'm glad to see you came to your senses quick. That Mary Tyler Moore was all show. Career girls—drivel. The truth is, everyone wants to live forever. It's a narcissistic need that began with Adam and Eve in the Garden—to see your seed produce its own. Children mean immortality. Give a man that and he'll stick by you no matter what forbidden fruit may come.”

She'd brushed it off as her mother being her usual pessimistic, holier-than-thou self. This was a new era. Women could have it all: a successful career, a perfect household, a devoted husband,
and
a thriving family. And she'd almost proved it. Eden had never expected that her own body would be her biggest obstacle. Jack could have children for years to come—just not with her. Better she left him before he left her for someone young with a belly full of immortal possibilities.

The cat food lay sideways in the middle of the floor. Eden picked up the tin and spotted a note from Jack atop the phone stand.

E, the girl next door is going to take care of Cricket. We'll figure out a more permanent solution when I return. Get some rest and I'll call you from Austin
.

Love, J
.

“What kind of name is Cricket?”

If they were going to name the dog, she would've liked a hand in it. Achilles, Fitzgerald, Cornwall, Manhattan—a conversation starter. Or at the very least, something they came up with together. But then, what did it matter? Soon there would be no more
together
anyhow.

She crumbled the paper into the pulpy meat tin and tossed it in the garbage. The doll's head sat on the marble counter, farther down from where she'd left it. It gazed directly at her with a snide smile. Eden held her breath a beat, though she hadn't meant to.

“Damn it, Jack,” she cursed aloud, exhaling the fear out with it.

In full daylight, the head was smaller than she'd remembered, smaller than in her dreams. Maybe four inches wide and six from crown to neck. Chipped to balding at the crown, the painted hair around the face still parted perfectly in wavy dark locks, giving way to a peachy forehead and rouged cheeks, loved off in patches; tired eyes were rimmed with dirt, the right one black, the left one olive, the harsh break just above it. Eden wondered why they were so oddly painted.

She picked it up, and something within clinked. The piece of porcelain from the chip, she figured, and turned it upside down to try to jiggle it free. When it wouldn't fall out, she worried she'd break the whole thing—shaken baby syndrome. So she let it be and wet a paper towel to clean the dirt off. The rose of the doll's cheeks shone through. The pursed lips gave way to a demure grin. This was loved, she thought, it
belonged
to someone.

“Where's your little girl now?” She finished bathing it, then set it on the windowsill so as not to risk it rolling off the countertop.

Outside the kitchen window, Cleo's ponytail bobbed up and down in the communal backyard. Eden shielded her eyes with the blade of her hand as she exited. The vegetal smell of warm summer dirt was nearly overpowering, a familiar scent from her childhood in Larchmont. She'd grown detached from it while living in the city.

The dog scampered through the rows of white-tipped basil blooms, snow peas hanging like green icicles, verdant fountains of lettuce. He
stopped every few paces to smell a flower or eat a leaf. When he saw Eden, he left the garden and bounded to her feet, licking her bare toes.

“What on earth,” she said, pulling her foot away. He moved on to the other. His tongue, like dewy pear skin, tickled. “You crazy dog,” she said, her voiced lilted with squelched laughter. She swished her long skirt to shoo him off, but he paid her no mind, his tail wagging from beneath the floral print. “You don't know where those feet have been, Cricket.”

Upon hearing his name, he lay down and inclined his head up to her, one fuzzy ear dangling to the dirt. She pulled the ear up and scratched behind it.

“Cricket,” she whispered again, and it seemed to fit. His dark eyes searched her face. An old soul within.

Eden had never had a pet as a child. Her mother didn't want to clean up after one. Her father said he would love a dog but they were so frequently traveling, it wasn't practical. “We'd have to kennel it for weeks at a time, and that's not fair, right?” he'd argued.

Even then, Eden recognized the irony. They didn't blink at boarding their children at sleepaway camps for the same amount of time.

The closest thing she'd had to a pet was the brown Tenderheart Care Bear she pretended was a dog when she was six years old. She fed him bowls of rock candy, brushed his fur with her hairbrush, let him sleep on her pillow, and took him with her everywhere her parents left her. Then one day she made the mistake of taking TCB on the Slip 'N Slide. His cotton body absorbed the water, grew fat and sodden, then rotted from the inside out. Her mother threw the doll away while Eden was at her weekly piano lesson. It was like losing the closest friend she'd ever known. Denny wouldn't come along for another three years. She wondered if the owner of the doll's head carried a similar memory of loss.